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John
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Reviews of John Mcphee's book Annals of the Former World by
John A. McPhee
Amazon.com
In 1978 New Yorker magazine staff writer John McPhee set out making
notes for an ambitious project: a geological history of North America,
centered, for the sake of convenience, on the 40th parallel, a history
that
encompasses billions of years. In 1981 he published the first of the four
books that would come from his research: Basin and Range, a study of
the mountainous lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas.
Two years later came In Suspect Terrain, a grand overview of the
Appalachian mountain system. In 1986 McPhee released Rising from
the Plains, a history of the Rocky Mountains set largely in Wyoming.
And in 1993 came Assembling California, a survey of the area
geologists find to be a laboratory of volcanic and tectonic processes,
a
place where geology can be watched in the making. Annals of the
Former World gathers these four volumes, which McPhee always
conceived of as a whole, to make that epic of the Earth's formation; to
it
he adds a fifth book, Crossing the Craton, which introduces the
continent's ancient core, underlying what is now Illinois, Iowa, and
Nebraska.
Mcphee's great virtue as a journalist covering the sciences--and any
other of the countless subjects he has taken on, for that matter--is his
ability to distill and explain complex matters: here, for example, the
processes of mineral deposition or of plate tectonics. He does so by
allowing geologists to speak for themselves and an entertaining lot they
are, those sometimes odd men and women who puzzle out the landscape
for clues to its most ancient past. Annals of the Former World is a
magisterial work of popular science for which geologists--and devotees
of good writing--will be grateful. --Gregory McNamee
John
Mcphee's book Annals of the Former World
by
John A. McPhee
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